In this solo episode of the Speak PR podcast, host Jim James explains why individuals and companies should support Wikipedia and walks listeners through the practical steps to create and maintain a corporate Wikipedia page. He begins by recounting his own decision to become a monthly donor to the Wikimedia Foundation after seeing a donation prompt on Wikipedia, and shares a personal tweet exchange with Amy Parker, a Wikimedia staff member, to illustrate the positive response donors receive. Jim then provides a series of statistics that highlight Wikipedia’s scale and impact: roughly 450 staff and contractors, 53 million media files on Wikimedia Commons, about 1 billion unique device visitors per month, a global traffic rank of #7, and a 2020 balance sheet of $191 million. He discusses the Foundation’s mission to freely disseminate knowledge and notes its financial sustainability, referencing Rockefeller’s principle that charities should be self‑financing. Transitioning to the corporate angle, Jim outlines the step‑by‑step process for establishing a company Wikipedia page: creating an account, becoming an auto‑confirmed user (account older than four days and at least ten approved edits), using the article wizard, ensuring all content is verifiable with third‑party citations, submitting the draft for review, and committing to ongoing updates to keep the page current. He emphasizes that Wikipedia is not a paid advertising platform; credibility and community contribution are essential. Finally, Jim frames donating to Wikipedia as an investment in future generations, noting that his daughters rely on the site for homework, and encourages listeners to donate, share the episode, and explore his PR courses at eastwestpr.com and speakpr.co.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for you if you're looking at ways to share the value in your organization with stakeholders. And this show, I'm going to talk about Wikipedia. Now we all know Wikipedia as being really the number one library in the sky. And I'm thinking about Wikipedia because Today, when I want to do a search on Google, one of the trusted sources was Wikipedia, and Wikipedia then popped up a little notice bar saying, would I like to donate? You know, and what I realized was that I've been using Wikipedia for as long as I can remember, and it was founded in June 2003 in Florida. But I've been using Wikipedia for as long as I can remember now, and it occurred to me that really I should make a contribution. And so I did. I decided to sign up and make a monthly contribution to the Wikimedia Foundation. And I tweeted that because it says, why not share? And then within a few minutes, a lady called Amy Parker from @SnuggleFestival wrote, I love your shout out. I work at the Wikimedia Foundation. I want you to know how grateful we are for your support. A gift to Wikipedia is a gift to the world. And I just wanted to share really because for a not a great contribution financially really, I have had a lovely reply from Amy Parker, but also made myself realize that there are a number of assets in the world that we take for granted and that we can contribute to. In order to sustain them. This is happening now more and more with the journalist portals like The Guardian and The Independent, which are subscriber-funded more than advertiser-funded. So I thought, having, uh, made a donation to Wikipedia today, I also thought that I should dig in a little bit more because a Wikipedia website for your company is actually something that is of great value. And I'll, I'll share with you a few statistics because we all go to Wikipedia, but how many of us know the work that Wikimedia Foundation has been doing? Well, the Wikipedia group has 450 staff and contractors supporting the Wikimedia projects, communities, donors, and readers. Now, the Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization— that's where Amy wrote to me from— that hosts Wikipedia and their other free knowledge projects. Now get this, the Wikimedia Foundation mission, which is very easy to find, is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. So we always talk about the need to make the user the hero, and in this case, the Wikimedia Foundation in their mission statement is talking about how they empower people with knowledge and that it has to be free. And obviously it has succeeded. Some 53 million media files are on the Wikimedia Commons website, which is the free media repository. Every month there are 1 billion unique device visitors to the website. 1 billion. Now the global rank is number 7 in the world. Interestingly enough, it's number 9 in the USA. These are from SimilarWeb, which is a website for analyzing websites. But the category Uh, for reference materials is where Wikipedia really holds its own. It's number one in the world. Now, the visitors to wikipedia.org come from 252 countries. 24.44% of the visitors come from America, but then the UK, Germany, and Japan all come in with about 5%, and Russia at 4.43% of all visitors to Wikipedia come from Russia. Now, interestingly enough as well, the average visit duration is 3.54 minutes, so nearly 4 minutes, and it's just under 3 pages per visit. So it's an astonishing repository, but it's also an amazingly sticky journal for people to go to. I couldn't resist but look at the Wikimedia Foundation finance report. Which is audited by KPMG in San Francisco. And the balance sheet for the Wikimedia Foundation stands at $191,262,962. That is in 2020 in the summer, up from $176,119,709 in 2019. So the balance sheet has increased, and my meager contribution, I think, isn't going to make a huge difference to their balance sheet. But it's kind of reassuring, really, that a project that is designed and built around contributed content, which is, which is of integrity and without promotional material inside, has such a global rank in terms of the reference materials, but also is not a charity. I mean, it is a charity, but that it's, it's actually managed to become a profitable center. And of course, the reason that's good is because it's sustainable. Rockefeller, the great industrialist, used to say that charities should always make money, and not because it was a money-making entity, But it showed that it was run in a sustainable way, and for it to be a proper charity and solve problems at a systemic level, Rockefeller always contributed money to charities which were actually self-financing and profitable. There we go. That from the book Titan, which is a fabulous read if you haven't read it already. So now, what if you want to get your company onto the Wikipedia? Website because it's something I've looked at for my own company, but also for many clients. Because if you can have a Wikipedia page, it's kind of like getting into the encyclopedia. So let's just have a look at how you can do that. And it is possible and it is free, but what one has to do is to establish one's credibility, and one also has to take part a little bit in being an author and an editor of other content online. In other words, this is participatory. It's not a website that you buy space and post, or that you just apply to the editor and they post it on your behalf. You self-publish, but that content has to have citations. So let's just take you through. First of all, we go to the Wikipedia homepage, and in the top right of the menu bar it says Create Account. And you can do that. Now then, when you first join Wikipedia, you'll see a pop-up box that says help improve Wikipedia. This is the participatory part. This is, if you like, the threshold that you have to cross over to ensure that really your intentions are indeed true and that you're really trying to contribute to the overall mission of sharing knowledge and not just trying to promote yourself. Now, you need to become an auto-confirmed user. So the Wikipedia guidelines for auto-confirmed users say that you have to have an account that is more than 4 days old, and you've had to have made at least 10 edits that have been confirmed by other editors on other articles. In other words, you have to prove that you're a source, a reference of credit, of note. So you need to open your account, spend the first few days or week editing other people's pages with facts. Of course, you can't just go in and change ands and put in full stops. You need to go in and actually make a difference. And then there will be links so that you can make your edits, and then it'll obviously update that because you've logged in as you, that these are your edits. Once you then are confirmed as a contributor, you will then be able to create your own page, and it will ask you to go to the writing an article page, and you can scroll down And then it shows you an article wizard and you can start to create your own articles. Now here you can start writing, or you could go in a sort of WordPress way and start to write your own, but taking their template seems to make a lot of sense really. Now if you don't already have a page, you're going to need to start from the beginning, and this obviously— ideally you've got all your content ready in advance. So you've got a 2-sentence overview of your company, and then you've got the information, and then you've got your history and whatever else you want to say about your company. Now, critical to Wikipedia is that whatever you enter is true and that it has citations, not from your own social media but from third-party websites, newspapers, journalists. In other words, other authorities. And of course, this is why we go to Wikipedia, because there is this integrity and due diligence on the content. So if we want to be on the website ourselves, we have to play by the same rules. So these citations, just as though it was a, an academic article, will establish the authority to your business or your product, for example. Not quite over yet. Then you need to submit the page for review, and the editors, as they are in Wikipedia, will review it, and only then will it get uploaded as an official page. Now, you have to remember that this is not the end of it. A Wikipedia page needs to be updated, a bit like, I guess, a blog really. So you might head up the rankings because Google, of course, indexes Wikipedia, but you need to update your content Or else your Google and Wikipedia will be out of date. Remember, if you're updating your social media— LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and even your own website— but the Wikipedia page comes up in advance of those, you could be in a position where your Wikipedia page is out of date and people are reading information that's no longer valid, and they're not getting down to your social media. So It's a, it's an engagement and it's a task that one has to be committed to taking on permanently. So that's pretty simple, actually. If you want to have a Wikipedia page, just go to wikipedia.org. What I would also encourage is that you go to wikipedia.org and when they ask you to contribute, do make a contribution. It is the world's free encyclopedia for most of us. It is the world's library. If you look at the website, there are English articles, Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and more. Okay, so we all are enjoying the benefits of what the Wikimedia Foundation have put online, but also importantly, our children are. I'm investing in Wikipedia not just for me but for my daughters who use Wikipedia for most of their homework. So if you've got children, just consider leaving a donation, a monthly subscription, because it's the best library card you could ever pass to the next generation. And if you're lucky like me, you may get a tweet from our friend Amy all the way over at the Wikimedia Foundation. So thanks for listening to this episode of Speak PR, all about Wikipedia, and how you can be part of the global program to share free and accurate information around the world. My name is Jim James. Thank you for listening to the Speak PR podcast. If you like it, please do subscribe or share it with other people. If you'd like to receive newsletters from us, please come to our website eastwestpr.com and subscribe. Or if you're interested in a mastermind, Come to speakpr.co where we have courses where you can learn all about how to get noticed using technology. So from me, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on learning and sharing, and maybe sharing on a Wikipedia.
